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Summit opens with little optimism

By Fred Pearce, Johannesburg

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, which opened in Johannesburg on Monday morning, is likely to be boycotted by as many as half of the world’s heads of state. While the delegates’ head-count will be a record at around 65 000, the turnout of world leaders will be much lower than at Rio, when two-thirds attended.

Tony Blair will be here for a day at most. George Bush is too busy holidaying in Texas to attend. Vladimir Putin has promised to show, but India’s prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee probably will not – unless China’s premier breaks cover and heads for Beijing airport.

Many fear being submerged in a political quagmire. The optimism that kept afloat the World Summit’s predecessor, the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is absent. The drive to “save the planet” has been replaced by a more messy and intractable agenda, trying to link environment and development under the banner of “sustainable development”.

Fearing diplomatic disaster, the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan earlier this year called on negotiators to concentrate on five major themes. He called for real progress in delivering clean water and energy, improving agriculture and health and protecting biodiversity.

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But the draft formal text being circulated here shows little sign of progress. “It is so weak. Much of it is unmeasurable, unverifiable statements of intent,” says Stephen Peake, a former UN bureaucrat who now lectures at Britain’s Open University. “There are only a few hard targets.”

Rampant corruption

Proposals to halve the number of people lacking basic sanitation by 2015 and set targets for nations to boost renewable energy generation have both been kicked into touch by nervous nations of the rich world. And calls for new measures to halt rampant government corruption have been stalled by the leaders of poor countries.

What is arguably the most pressing global issue of all – climate change – has been written out of the script altogether. Even though it, too, is beginning to create poverty. World grain production has fallen for the third year running – a fact attributed by veteran US agricultural analyst Lester Brown this week to heat stress from record global temperatures.

Intellectually, the case for sustainable development is much stronger today than a decade ago. Since Rio, unprecedented economic growth has been accompanied by both continued environmental destruction and worsening poverty.

“Growing gap”

Greens point out that another 2.4 per cent of forests have gone and greenhouse gas emissions are up by 9 per cent. Meanwhile, the world’s 50 poorest nations have become poorer. Not just relatively poorer, but absolutely poorer.

The UN Environment Programme will report to the summit this week that these facts are linked. Since Rio “there has been a steady decline in the environment. One of the key driving forces has been the growing gap between rich and poor.”

Yet, the political agenda seeks to deny this. The calls from the White House, large corporations and the World Trade Organisation are for the world to unleash market forces in the name of poverty alleviation. And, with greens in retreat, those calls will reverberate through the halls of the Sandton Conference Centre in Johannesburg this week. The British charity Christian Aid says big business has “hijacked the summit.”